Two Klan Leaders Are Charged in a North Carolina Stabbing

A police photo of William Hagen, the Grand Dragon of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.CreditCaswell County Sheriff, via European Pressphoto Agency

Two Ku Klux Klan leaders, including a California man who organized a violent “White Lives Matter” rally in Anaheim earlier this year, were arrested in North Carolina over the weekend in connection with a stabbing before a Klan parade celebrating the election of Donald J. Trump.

The Orange, Calif. man, William Hagen, 50, is the grand dragon of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a racist group active in the western United States. He and another Klan leader, Chris Barker, 37, were accused of stabbing a third Klan member, the Caswell County sheriff’s office said in a statement late Tuesday. The two men appeared in court on Wednesday.

The victim, Richard Dillon, 47, had stumbled into the lobby of the sheriff’s office at 3:15 a.m. Saturday with several stab wounds to the chest, after a fight at a Klan meeting in Mr. Barker’s home in East Yanceyville, N.C., according to Captain Frank Rose, a sheriff’s office spokesman. Mr. Dillon was treated at a local medical center and released.

Mr. Hagen was in North Carolina to attend that parade, the authorities said. Mr. Barker was arrested before the parade, and Mr. Hagen after, during a traffic stop, Captain Rose said.

Mr. Hagen was charged with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, inflicting serious injury, and Mr. Barker was charged with aiding and abetting assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, inflicting serious injury, the sheriff’s office said. Both men were being held in lieu of secured bond.

The Loyal White Knights group is among the most active in the United States, said Dr. Brian Levin, the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. Mr. Hagen, who is also known as William Quigg, leads the white supremacist organization in the swath of the Western United States that stretches from Texas to California. The Anti-Defamation League identified Mr. Barker as the leader of the group’s wing in North Carolina, in a report released earlier this year.

Dr. Levin was present at the February rally in Anaheim, which law enforcement at the time described as an anti-immigration rally with the theme “white lives matter.” Roughly 30 anti-Klan protesters attacked two Klansmen at that rally, and two of them were later charged in connection with the melee.

He described Mr. Hagen as a Holocaust denier who traveled to South Carolina to protest the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the statehouse after nine African-Americans were killed by Dylann Roof, a white supremacist, in a mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. Mr. Roof is currently on trial.

“The Klan in California is insignificant except for efforts of people like him,” Dr. Levin said of Mr. Hagen. “Their numbers are insignificant but they are very good at getting attention, getting press and inciting violence from criminal anti-fascists” like the anti-Klan activists who attacked the rally in Anaheim.

Dr. Levin said the small size of the Klan on the West Coast was not an indication of their influence on extreme fringes of the far right. He said the group had become “part of the fabric that extends all the way into the alt-right,” the far-right fringe movement that embraces white nationalism and a range of racist positions.

“The first thing I saw when those guys were getting out of their vehicle in Anaheim and getting beaten were signs getting tossed around that said ‘stop white cultural genocide,’ ” he said. “The Klan is really hooking into the euro-nationalism of the alt-right. When I asked those Klansmen who they supported, they said Trump.”